The digital availability of the very large data collections from various historical and modern sources describing jigsaw pieces of the lives of individuals, challenges for new methods and approaches to realize large-scale life cycle and population reconstruction. Methods are needed that are capable of weighting all pieces of available information from a wide range of sources while considering contemporary and local circumstances. Such an approach may resemble the intelligent human reasoning in handling fuzzy, variable, erroneous and missing data.
Whereas for several decades the focus in reconstruction studies largely was on data matching of record pairs, promising results on group linking are now emerging.  At the dawn of the development of these new and more complex population reconstruction methods, with activities in many countries – sometimes isolated, but also in research networks –, it is timely to bring experts together again to discuss the current state of the art, and to look for opportunities for continued or renewed cooperation.

Key-note speakers are Peter Christen, Research School of Computer Science, Australian National University, Canberra, Kris Inwood, University of Guelph, Canada and Arno Knobbe, Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden, the Netherlands.

More information can be found on the webpages of the workshop.